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Thursday, June 02, 2011

Why, now, is Communism "OK"? One myth that flickered underneath all the horrid history about Communism was that, even though the Communist system allowed no opportunity, it likewise gave you free or very low rent. Medicine was free. Education was free. Get it? No bankruptcies. No foreclosures. No debt. When you tell an American how much was "free," he assumes it was at or near his accustomed level. If you find the "entitlements" of Communism seductive, I want to reach through your monitor and grab you by the collar and shake you. The "expense-free" Communist subject had a miserable quality of life.

But, now that the atrocities of Communism are fading from the American memory, the promises of Communism sound rather interesting in a bad American economy. All I'm promising is that Communism is the world's biggest consumer fraud.

A Communist is someone who cannot see a fat man standing beside a thin man without concluding the fat man got that way at the expense of the thin man.

Barry Farber does a great job to explain what Communism should be held accountable for in the 20th Century. And, he reminds us what can happen when people forget. Honestly, I have to wonder what could possibly have shoved all of the bad memories of what Communist nations did to their people down the memory hole. The media? Educators? Government propaganda? Hope and change?

I challenge anyone to show me where Communism has ever worked. In fact, show me where any Communist country has ever gone without committing genocide in order to gain and keep power!

Thank you, Barry Farber, for writing this column! It is about time that somebody plugged the memory hole, and pulled some of the grim memories, that never should be forgotten, out of that abyss. And thank you again for reminding us that liberals are leading us to that memory hole by helping us to quit hating entitlements and class envy first.

And guess what? While we still have the freedom to write about it, now is the time to work on keeping too many people from falling into the bottomless memory hole. It could be our last chance. But, hey, I understand if you want to stay silent. We all know who's doors would be knocked down first should we be on the losing side. I'm just sayin'...

The cartoon showed two 6-year-old boys sitting on a fence admiring a 5-year-old girl, nose in the air, perky and cute as a speckled puppy under a red wagon. "If I ever quit hating girls," said one of the boys, "I'm going to quit hating HER first!"

Communism is out of the closet, out on the American street under its own name and doing its best to be heard and heeded. This is the second time American Communists have been comfortable preaching, parading and plotting without hiding behind front groups shouting "Peace" and "Equality" and pretending their real name and aim is something like "Milk for Bulgarian Babies." Before World War II, being a Communist was fashionable. It made you a kind of automatic moral giant. Journalist Lincoln Steffens returned to America from the brand-new Soviet Union and declared, "I have seen the future, and it works!"

Why this, and why now? Authentic American hero Dave Bego, who defied and defeated the efforts of the all-powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to bludgeon him into accepting unionization of his industrial cleaning company, Executive Management Services, sent me a literally unbelievable "picture show" of a joint SEIU and Communist Party rally in Los Angeles in which the union members carried Communist flags and the marching Communists carried union signs.

All of the joy and prestige of being a Communist vanished shortly after the Americans and British, with our Soviet allies, destroyed Nazi Germany. The true face of Communism became abruptly plain. Territory conquered by Allied troops was liberated. That conquered by the Communists was enslaved. The Berlin Blockade was a shameless Soviet abrogation of our agreements.

The Iron Curtain descended across Europe. The Nazi "knock-on-the-door" followed by the permanent disappearance of those inside, the torture chambers, the total repression of all freedoms, life sentences in the Gulag for the crime of listening to foreign broadcasts, the works – really the whole Nazi works – unfolded. It's true, opportunistic American politicians demagogued Communism for votes, but they did more service to America than those demagoguing Paul Ryan's attempt to reform entitlements today.